Dolly Parton can already boast of as many accomplishments as there are rhinestones on her famously eye-popping stage costumes. And far from slowing down at age 78, the country-and-western legend has at least one item remaining on her bucket list: telling her life story on the Broadway stage.
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“Right now, I’m working on my life story as a musical, and so going on Broadway and opening my show on Broadway, that’s been a biggie [goal] in my mind for many, many years,” the 11-time Grammy winner told People magazine recently. “That’d be the one that I want to make certain I get done while I’m still kicking, while I’m around to stay involved in it.”
[RELATED: 4 Hit Songs You Didn’t Know Dolly Parton Wrote Solo]
The Musical That Was Almost a Movie
Parton first teased the currently untitled project in a 2016 interview with Variety. She shared with People that she hopes to see it hit New York by spring of 2025.
The musical — for which Parton wrote the music and half of the script — charts Parton’s story arc from a one-room cabin in poverty-stricken Appalachia to the unprecedented superstardom she enjoys today.
After the Broadway doors shut in the spring of 2020, Parton briefly entertained the notion of writing her life story as a biopic instead, she told USA Today in October 2023.
“But then I was like, “Nah, everybody’s doing a biopic! I’m going back to Broadway now that it’s open,” she told the outlet.
Half a Century of Dolly
Further proving that Parton will never run out of material for a musical based on her life, in 2023 she celebrated the 50th anniversary of her hit tearjerker “I Will Always Love You.”
The song, which Parton wrote solo, was recorded in 1973 and released the next year, when it quickly hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.
(Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images for American Greetings)
